Charles Rohlfs

Private Collection, Depew, New York, circa 1900
Thence by descent
Shultz Auctioneers, Clarence, New York, June 15, 2019
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Will M. Clemens, "A New Art and a New Artist," The Puritan, August 1900, p. 586
Wendy Kaplan, The Art That is Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Boston, 1987, p. 95 (for a period photograph showing the model in Charles Rohlfs’ living room in the collection of the Winterthur Library)
Michael L. James, Drama in Design: The Life and Craft of Charles Rohlfs, exh. cat., Burchfield Art Center, Buffalo, NY, 1994, pp. 37 (for a period photograph of the model in the collection of The Winterthur Library, photograph gift of Lisa Ortman) and 73 (for the above mentioned period photograph of Rohlfs' living room)
Joseph Cunningham, The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs, New Haven, CT, 2008, pp. 89 (for the above mentioned period photograph in the collection of The Winterthur Library), 90 (for a variant of the model in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum, gift of Max Palevsky and Jodie Evans), 142 (for a period photograph of the model at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, National Arts Club, New York, November-December 1900, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution) and 224-226 (for the above mentioned and additional photographs of the model in Rohlfs’ living room in the collection of the Winterthur Library)

Charles Rohlfs' ability to impart utilitarian objects with exquisite, refined, and intellectual decoration was unparalleled by his contemporaries, and firmly placed him within an artistic category all his own.  His coal hod, or coal box, design exemplifies this talent, combining function and form through his own distinctive artistic vocabulary characterized by a highly architectural structure and conventionalized organic decorative motifs. Rohlfs produced a limited variety of this model with carved details of varying complexity.  An early example executed in 1900, the comparatively subdued carving decorations on the present coal hod are a precursor to the more elaborate carvings that Rohlfs would incorporate into his later examples of the design.  The original owner of this lot hailed from Buffalo, New York, where Rohlfs had his workshop, and it has remained in the same family since the second quarter of the twentieth century.